Tuesday, June 28, 2016

He's bored

Donald Trump is bored. It's his primary (pun intended) characteristic. It's why he has long since stopped actually putting up buildings -- too much process, too many considerations, too much actually to operate -- and instead turned his business model into licensing his name to others, who do the actual work. It's also why he hasn't set up an actual campaign operation. How boring is that?

Donald Trump isn't just a little bit bored, or periodically bored. He's deeply bored. He's always bored. He's essentially retired from the real estate business, and his boredom has increased exponentially -- as it does for many retirees -- as he runs away from actual work or any demands from the actual world... from reality itself, in its endless, inescapable boredom. Fantasy is much more entertaining. He's even bored with the project of building those temples to boredom, golf courses.

This is, however, a perfect emotional fuel for a reality TV celebrity/host/impressario. It gives him a perfect ear for what will bring in continued ratings. He himself is a programming weathervane for the boredom of the depressed white no-longer-working class, people who despair of having a trajectory in their lives and desperately crave a stimulus to distract them from the depressing subject of trajectory entirely... the people who are killing themselves in record numbers. Trump is reality TV -- an endless stream of superficial-stimulus drugs.

And, by the way, this is also why the television news media has eaten him like cotton candy throughout the primaries. Boredom is their principal fuel, too. And Trump is a walking, breathing news feed. But it's also why they have now turned on him and will work to destroy his legitimacy. Because he's a threat to them -- as any drug on which one overdoses is. He exposes their own ADHD. They depend on the premise that reality is real, and substantive and mostly boring... and that their job is to go meta on that. If everything is stimulus, then the whole thing becomes meta and floats off into the ether. They need a tether. They didn't understand at first that Trump wasn't of the world, but of them, so he perplexed and fascinated and played them for a year. That's over now.

Anyway, bottom line -- Trump isn't running to become president. He's running to run. And when he suffers a crushing defeat -- well, that won't be boring, will it? In fact, there's nothing to stop him from continuing his "campaign" against boredom indefinitely, in public view, on satellite TV and radio. Hillary will actually have to be president -- and bless her heart, she actually craves that. She gets off on real thinking, real work, on setting up and running operations. Whether she governs in prose or poetry, she'll be putting her whole and true self into it. Meanwhile, The Donald will help her by making sure there isn't a five-minute stretch in which either her name or his is not trending.